Hospital tells 200 patients they are dead
0:27

A Melbourne hospital has mistakenly sent out death notices for hundreds of its living patients.

Sky News

14 Aug 2014

News

MORE than 200 Victorian patients were temporarily written off as dead after a major metropolitan hospital accidentally sent out death notices to their general practitioners.

The error resulted in GPs mistakenly being sent a fax to say their patient had died following their hospital visit.

All affected GPs were contacted by the Austin Health within hours to apologise and inform them of the mistake.

The Australian Medical Association Victoria said the incident was unacceptable and may have been distressing to GPs who often had long term relationships with patients and their families.

The Herald Sun understands the majority of GPs were altered to the error before they had the chance to call families, but at least one GP contacted a family member to express their condolences.

Austin Health has apologised for the incident, which was caused by human error.

The Austin hospital accidentally sent out the death notices.

The health service notifies GPs automatically when their patients are discharged from hospital.

Austin Health spokeswoman Taryn Sheehy said the notifications sent out in the early hours of Wednesday July 30 incorrectly advised GPs that their patients, who had been discharged the previous day, had died.

The error was realised later that morning.

“We apologised unreservedly to affected clinics who, for the most part, were very understanding about the error,” she said.

The mistake was made when the template notifying GPs of his or her patient’s death was being updated and it was accidentally saved as a standard template.

The error was not related to the hospital’s new patient choice booking system nor had it affected patient care, she said.

AMA Victoria president Dr Tony Bartone said the error was unacceptable.

“Many of these GPs have long relationships with these patients and their families,” he said.

“It would have been distressing to receive such a fax, especially relating to the unexpected death of children and teenagers.”

Dr Bartone said the incident underlined the importance of a strong and robust statewide IT system for Victorian health services.

News.com.au's Privacy Policy includes important information about our collection, use and disclosure of your personal information (including to provide you with targeted content and advertising based on your online activities). It explains that if you do not provide us with information we have requested from you, we may not be able to provide you with the goods and services you require. It also explains how you can access or seek correction of your personal information, how you can complain about a breach of the Australian Privacy Principles and how we will deal with a complaint of that nature.

A NOTE ABOUT RELEVANT ADVERTISING: We collect information about the content (including ads) you use across this site and use it to make both advertising and content more relevant to you on our network and other sites.